Sunday, 4 December 2016

JUDAH A. JOFFE

JUDAH
A. JOFFE (April 18, 1873-September 16, 1966)

He was born in Bakhmut, southern
Russia. His father, Yekhiel-Lipman, came
from Vitebsk; he had in his earlier years left to live in the colony of
Novo-Zlatopol (Novozlatopil’), Ekaterinoslav district, where he married and
raised two children, and then decided to abandon his life as a farmer and
proceed to study in the rabbinical seminary in Zhitomir, but friends of his
discouraged him from doing so, and instead he moved to Bakhmut where he opened
a private school and built a new home for himself and his family. Although he was a self-taught man, he
achieved a high degree of education. He
possessed extraordinary linguistic talent, read Plato and Aristotle in the
original, and in addition to Greek and Latin he could read several European
languages—and he was an exceptional mathematician. Joffe’s mother, too, was a gifted woman and
ran the school with her husband. It was
in this home that Joffe grew up. He,
too, demonstrated from his youth exceptional linguistic abilities. At age eight he learned Greek, and at age
eleven he read Caesar in Latin. At age
eighteen he graduated first in his class from the classical high school in
Ekaterinoslav (now, Dnepropetrovsk), and right afterward his entire family
departed. In 1876 Joffe’s father with
his eldest son (later, Dr. Yosef Joffe, of the Baron Hirsch colony in
Argentina) spent a short time in the United States and then returned to
Bakhmut. After the anti-Jewish pogroms
in southern Russia (1881), the family lived for a time (1882) in Paris and
again returned to Bakhmut. In 1891 the
Joffe family moved permanently to the United States and settled in New
York. Judah enrolled at Columbia
University, studied general philology with a professor of Latin, Harry Thurston
Peck, and received his B. A. in 1893; he went on (1893-1897) to study, also at
Columbia, Indo-Iranian languages (two years of this time with a stipend from
the university), and in the summer of 1901 he took a course in pedagogy; 1909-1910
he took courses in phonetics and English historical grammar with the famous
Danish linguist, Professor Otto Jespersen (who, incidentally, studied Russian
phonetics with Joffe); in these years, he studied Sanskrit, Old Persian, and
the Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages.
He also devoted time to mathematics and music, not solely as an amateur
but as a scholar and specialist in both fields.
For decades he was a teacher of Latin and mathematics in a high
school. He was also a lecturer in
Russian at Columbia University and City College in New York. He worked on various dictionaries,
encyclopedias, and yearbooks, as well as serving as co-editor, and he engaged
in translations from numerous languages and wrote (in English) for them on
Slavic languages and literatures as well as on music.

Professor Joffe was to be connected
to Yiddish philology for over a half century—from his publication in Chaim
Zhitlovsky’s Dos naye lebn (The new
life) in New York (August 1909) of “Di klangen fun yidish un der yidisher
alef-beys” (The sounds of Yiddish and the Yiddish alphabet). From the very first day of his scholarly
activities in Yiddish, Joffe evinced a particularly perceptive interest in Old
Yiddish and Old Yiddish texts. On his
own he collected in his home an immensely rich library which, from the number
of rarities, had few competitors. Living
for so many in New York, far from the concentrated Jewish communities in
Eastern Europe, he did not even have anyone with whom to cross-fertilize his
discoveries and explanations of Old Yiddish texts. The only place at which Joffe attempted to do
this over many years was the Jewish teachers’ seminary. Initially, at the time of WWII, when the
French university in exile (École Libre des Hautes Études) was organized in New
York, Joffe was invited there as an instructor in Yiddish language and
literature. He received a regular
professor’s office where he worked for many years on his beloved Old Yiddish
texts, and Yiddish became a disciplinary subject to teach and research in a
general institution of higher learning in the world. His second work in Yiddish research was “Shraybn
oder shrayben? (Fun vanen kumt aroys
unzer mame-loshn?) ([How do we write the word in Yiddish for “to write”:] shraybn or shrayben? Where does our
mother tongue come from?), Literatur
(Literature) in New York (July 1910). The
third piece was a treatise about the Vilna serial Pinkes (Records) in 1913, edited by Shmuel Niger, in Tsukunft (Future) in New York (September
1914). Then, after a lengthy
interruption, he published his work, “Fun vanen shtamt dos vort geto?” (The
origin of the word ghetto), Landoy-bukh
(Landoy volume), the first volume of Filologishe
shriftn (Philological writings) of YIVO (Vilna, 1926); this piece was
reprinted in English translation in YIVO
Annual of Jewish Social Science I (New York, 1946), pp. 260-73. With the establishment in October 1925 of the
American division of YIVO and with the preparation of its Pinkes (published 1927-1928), this was a great incentive to Joffe’s
scholarly work in the field of Yiddish philology. Aside from a wide assortment of short pieces,
Joffe published in the New York Pinkes
such works as: “Katoves tsi ksubes?” (Jokes or marriage contracts?); “Vegn
vokativ in yidish” (On the vocative in Yiddish); “Bodnzikhtik” (?); “Vegn der
biblyografye fun ‘simkhes hanefesh’” (On the bibliography of the Joy of the Soul); “Vegn lubliner tsenerene”
(On the Lublin [edition of the] Tsenerene). He also published classical research in “Der
slavisher element in yidish” (The Slavic elements in Yiddish), Pinkes fun amopteyl fun yivo (Records of
the American division of YIVO) 1/2 (pp. 235-56, 296-312), which elicited a
scholarly polemic in many Jewish communities and drew the attention of Jewish scholars
throughout the world to Yiddish philology in America. He went on to publish his research in Yivo-bleter (Pages from YIVO), until
1939 in Vilna and thereafter in New York, including: “Di ershte oysgabe fun ‘kav
hayasher’” (The first edition of Kav
hayashar [A just measure]), issue 7 (1934); “Yidish in amerike” (Yiddish in
America), a controversial work but of considerable value, issue 8 (1935); “Hundert
un fuftsik yor yidish” (One hundred, fifty years of Yiddish), issue 15 (1940);
and “Yidishe prakht-drukn” (Fine Yiddish publishers), issue 15 (1940); among
others. Other work by Joffe would
include: “Di eltste forsher fun yidish” (The oldest researcher in Yiddish), Der tog (The day) in New York (February
5, 1928); a piece in Filologishe shriftn
(YIVO) 3 (Vilna, 1929); a piece in Yidish
(Yiddish) in New York (June 1932); an essay in Yidish far ale (Yiddish for everyone) in Warsaw (December 1938); essays
in Yidishe shprakh (Yiddish language)
in New York, from July-August 1941 on; “Alt yidishe literatur” (Old Yiddish
literature), with N. B. Minkov, in Algemeyne
entsiklopedye (General encyclopedia), “Yidn G”; and elsewhere. In 1949 there appeared the first volume (of a
planned three volumes) of Elye bokher,
poetishe shafungen in yidish (Elye Bokher, poetic writings in Yiddish), “with
philological comments, an Old Yiddish dictionary, and a short grammar by Judah
A. Joffe,” which contained a reproduction of the first edition Elye Bokher’s Bovo-bukh (or Bovo dantone (Isny, 1541), with an introduction by Joffe: “Elye bokher,
der mentsh un der kinstler” (Elye Bokher, the man and the artist), at the
beginning of the volume in Yiddish and at the end of English. In it he investigated the text of this
classical work on the basis of a series of editions in the Italian
language. He had in manuscript a number
of works, in the field of Yiddish as well as concerning syntax and morphology
of the Yiddish language. Of considerable
value and significance was Joffe’s contribution to the Groyser yidisher verterbukh (Great Yiddish dictionary), the first
volumes of which appeared in the early 1960s.
His dozens of scholarly papers at YIVO conferences, bit by bit, published
as separate works, although the majority of them still remain still in
manuscript. His writings in English
would include: “Note on Eur. ‘Medea’: vss. 340-345,” The Classical Review (London) 10.2 (March 1896), p. 104; “Russian
Literature and Its Latest Historian,” The
Bookman (December 1900), pp. 43-47; all the entries on Slavic languages and
literatures, various authors, music, and the like, in New International Encyclopedia (New York, 1902); on Jews, music,
Russian authors, and the like, in International
Yearbook (1900, 1901, 1902); on music and opera, in Nelson’s Looseleaf Encyclopedia (New York, 1910); “Russian
Literature,” in Lectures on Literature
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), pp. 311-32; on abbreviations in New Websterian 1912 Dictionary (New
York, 1912); a short dictionary of the English language (Cleveland: World
Syndicate Publishing Co., 1937-1938), 400 pp.; also contributed to Collegiate Dictionary for the same
publisher; style editor for Psychiatric
Dictionary by Dr. L. E. Hinsie and Dr. J. Shatzky (New York, 1940); the
entry on Yiddish, in Universal Jewish
Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York, 1943), pp. 598-602; “The Yiddish Language,”
in Colliers Encyclopedia; editor and contributor
to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the
American Language, Encyclopedic Edition (1951); on Russian music in the early
nineteenth century, in Critical Review
(December 1954); “Dating the Origin of Yiddish Dialects,” in The Field of Yiddish: Language, Folklore,
and Literature, ed. Uriel Weinreich (New York, 1954), pp. 102-21. Among his translations (or translations under
his editorship), one would find the following: from English into Yiddish, Professor
A. A. Goldenweiser, Antropologye
(Anthropology) (New York, 1920), 217 pp.; from Russian into English, Byliny (Russian oral folk epic stories),
and books by Rimsky-Korsakov and Sabaneev on music; from German into French,
the laws of indemnity for workers in Hungary, Finland, France, and Belgium (Washington,
1909); among others.

Judah A. Joffe was all these years also
involved in community activities, initially in the “Educational League” (1900-1913)
and later on the board of the American division of YIVO and on the YIVO board
in New York. He was the honorary
chairman of the linguistics circle at YIVO.
On his seventieth birthday in 1943, Yivo-bleter
published a bibliography of his writings and an article about him. Ten years later, on his eightieth birthday, a
second YIVO publication, Yidishe shprakh,
brought out three special Judah Joffe issues (8.2, 8.3, and 8.4) (New York,
1953). On his eighty-fifth birthday,
YIVO issued the Yude a. yofe-bukh
(Judah A. Joffe volume), ed. Yudel Mark (New York, 1958), 320 pp., with a biography
of the honoree and a bibliography of all his works until then. In April 1960 he gave his rare collection of
over 1000 books in Old Yiddish to the library of the Jewish Theological
Seminary in New York. He lived in New
York until his death in the Riverdale neighborhood.